Each year, publicly held companies distribute booklets to their stockholders. These booklets, cleverly called Annual Reports, contain financial statements and analyses, letters from the CEO, and restatements of the company’s philosophy and scope. Not, in my view, particularly interesting reading.

One exception was Marvel, the comic book publisher, which did their Annual Reports in comic book format, that is, until a pair of parasites named Icahn and Perelman sucked all the blood out of the company, leading it to bankruptcy in 1996. (The company was resurrected, largely through the efforts of Avi Arad. CBS News correspondent Dan Raviv wrote a good book on the subject).

Another exception, which just came to my attention about ten days ago, is Entergy Corporation, which produces and distributes electric power. The content is still pretty dry, but this year Entergy used the styles of Pulp magazines and Film Noir posters to decorate their Annual Report. Not much else to say about it, but I found it pretty clever for something that is normally a pencil-pushing nightmare.

Watching the Detectives

I can be a little behind the times when it comes to popular culture. Don’t get me wrong, I love popular culture. I live popular culture. But it’s usually last year’s – or last decade’s – popular culture that I’m hip to.

Did I just use the word “hip?”

Anyhow, this past week I’ve made two new best friends: Jonathan Creek and Doctor Tony Hill. I haven’t actually met either of these men. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, neither are real people. Both are sleuths on British television programs that have been on the air longer than I wish to admit.

I was introduced to Jonathan Creek two weeks ago when fellow Criminal Briefer Rob Lopresti, responding to my column about magicians in mysteries, mentioned the program. The BBC program features a quirky loner (the titular Jonathan Creek) who designs and builds stage illusions for a renowned magician. In the first episode, Creek teams up with investigative journalist Maddie Magellen to prove the innocence of a burglar accused of murdering a famous artist. Creek and Magellen are about as unlikely a team as you’ll find. Creek (played by comedian Alan Davies) is quiet, cautious, reserved, and gently thoughtful with his baby face and long curly hair. Magellen (played by Caroline Quentin) is brash, loud, and only marginally honest.

The program premiered in May, 1997, and ran for four seasons, with Caroline Quentin leaving the series after 2000. What makes the show a gem, in addition to the quirky characters and their comedic interplay, is that every episode involves an impossible crime (mostly locked-room murders, but occasionally an apparent supernatural crime) that Creek solves using his profound knowledge of illusions and misdirection.

My other new best friend is Doctor Tony Hill (not to be confused with my friend and colleague Doctor Tony Harris, who has been haunting this site for the past few weeks). The central character on the ITV program Wire in the Blood (Here is a link to the ITV webpage), and played by actor Robson Green, Hill is a clinical psychologist whose own grip on reality is a little shaky. Where Jonathan Creek is quirkily funny, Wire in the Blood is quirkily edgy. The laughs that I emit while watching Wire are as much a result of nerves as they are a tribute to the witty script.

Speaking of the script, Wire in the Blood is based on a series of novels by a real-life hero of mine, Val McDermid. The Scotland born McDermid is a journalist, a reviewers’ reviewer, and an authors’ author. Her books are intense and intelligent.

Wire in the Blood premiered in 2002, and I’ve only discovered it this week. Did I not say I was slow?

8 comments

I’ve tried “Blood in the Wire” many times, but had to give up because I couldn’t understand it. My problem with British mystery stories started with Agatha Christie. I became so lost in the complicated plots, the novels made me feel stupid. Even by the end, the sense of accomplishment one should feel at the end of a book was lost to feelings of inferiority. My brain — trained to master chemistry and physics — couldn’t equal the abilities of Inspector Poirot. Hearing dense mystery stories in audio increases the degree of difficulty, because one cannot just flip back a few pages to remind yourself who certain characters are, or use a magic marker. To be honest, I read this blog hoping a great epiphany will come to me which unlocks the secret to understanding crime novels.

The second barrier I found in “Blood in the Wire” stood with the language. Although American English and British English should be similar, the differences can be as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. Instead of taking on the whole subject, let me focus on a single word I first heard on “Blood in the Wire” — wanker. First of all, wanker is a pejorative term, meaning one who masturbates. The equivalent in American English would be to call someone a jerk off. However, the word has developed a metaphorical usage meaning that someone is pretentious or a snob. Wikipedia has a complete treatment of the word, ending with an assessment of just how bad it is:

“In December, 2000, research published by the Advertising Standards Authority into attitudes of the British public to pejoratives ranked wanker as the fourth most severe pejorative in English. The BBC describes it as moderately offensive and almost certain to generate complaints if used before the [late-night hours]. In Australia it is considered mildly offensive but is widely accepted and used in the media.”

There is a foreign film running now called IN BRUGES. The English being spoken, an Irish, lower-class dialect, left my head spinning most of the time. The noir comedy has lines which left the whole audience laughing, except me. The lines were fast, indistinct, and some might as well have been Russian or Urdu.

And because the British can be such wankers, they almost never add subtitles or closed captions to their DVDs for the linguistically challenged like myself.

I love Val McDermid. She is about the best company in a tavern anybody could hope for — although I remember having a drink with her and Laurie King in the bar after the Edgar Banquet a few years years ago — it was the year that the awards ceremony was MC’d by Jerry Orbach — and they were complaining that there were too many celebrities and not enough writers presenting the awards, which I thought was a little unfair to Bob Levinson, who had called in all sorts of markers to try to make the event worthy of press attention by getting all those celebrities to attend. After all, the writers won all the awards. I thought it a little uncharitable to complain, especially as they are both so generally gracious.

But to be honest, I find “Wire in the Blood” to be absolutely unwatchable, with all the fractured scene cuts, nonlinear exposition, and over-the-top cinema verité camera work. I never know what the hell is going on. It’s a crime show for people who enjoy MTV.

I love Wrie in The Blood! But not the latest one when he comes to America to solve a case. It takes place in the south of course with all the redneck people clinging to their guns and religion.And everyone is sweating even inside buildings! The English think we don’t have air conditioning way down there below the Mason Dixon.

“Danger Man” was aired in the U.S. in the 60s as “Secret Agent”. It was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid. It was a straightforward spy drama. I would not call it noir, although it certainly had cynical moments. Against the noir label I would point out that its hero, John Drake, was celibate as a monk, and that he always escaped destruction and usually defeated his adversaries.

As far as “The Prisoner” goes, Patrick McGoohan always strongly denied that No. 6 was Drake and likewise denied any connection between the two series. On the whole, I agree with him: “Danger Man” was very realistic and gritty, lacking all of the bizarre surrealism that characterized “The Prisoner”.

I have trouble with British accents too (anyone else struggle with the Yorkshire tones of All Creatures Great And Small?) but I enjoyed IN BRUGES a lot.

I loved Secret Agent and still remember the title of a TV Guide article about it, comparing it to the flashier shows like Man From Uncle: Carries No Gun, Covets No Woman, Courts No Violence. And I would add one more thing about John Drake; sometimes he didn’t win. Unheard of in a US spy show.

I agree that The Prisoner was one of the greatest shows on tv. Back in the pre-DVD years I bought up most of the episodes individually on eBay and gleefully showed the first one to my teenage daughter, who said, “Are the other episodes better?” So I grounded her for life.

Criminal Brief: The Mystery Short Story Web Log Project - Copyright 2011 by the respective authors. All rights reserved.
Opinions expressed are solely those of the author expressing them, and do not reflect the positions of CriminalBrief.com.